Warren Farrell

Who he is

Warren Farrell, born in 1943, is an American author whose path is the single most important back-story in the men's rights movement. He did not start there: in the early 1970s he sat on the board of the National Organization for Women in New York City, a visible male ally of second-wave feminism. Over the following decade he grew critical of that movement and turned to what he saw as the neglected side of the ledger — the ways men and boys are disadvantaged — publishing a run of books from Why Men Are the Way They Are (1986) to The Boy Crisis (2018). ^[1]

The book that made him foundational was 1993's The Myth of Male Power, so central to what followed that Wikipedia describes him as

the intellectual father of the men's rights movement

^[1]

— a label whose activist form he himself rejects. ^[1]

Why he matters here

Farrell matters to this site for two reasons, and they pull in opposite directions. First, he is the origin point for grievances the manosphere now recites — several of which name real, measurable harms this site documents: that men do the overwhelming majority of workplace deaths, that male suicide is a large, under-served problem, and that fathers can fare badly in custody. Reading him is the clearest way to see how a catalogue of genuine male disadvantage — the logic of male disposability — was first assembled.

Second, he is a reminder that the men's rights movement is not the manosphere. Farrell predates the online ecosystem by decades, works in the register of policy and therapy rather than dominance and "escaping the matrix", and has distanced himself from its harder edges. Where his framework overreaches — hardening real disadvantages into a totalising theory — is assessed in the review of The Myth of Male Power; for the modern, more careful version of the same evidence, see Richard Reeves.

Farrell was not offered a right of reply for this initial profile; if that offer is made, it and any response will be logged here.